Amidst the heightened focus on Good Friday and Easter Sunday this week, I can’t help but feel those sandwiched in between these immense events: Holy Saturday. Friday was when the disciples’ hopes and dreams took a horrific turn, when all the words and promises of God incarnate [Jesus] did not match their reality: He was dead, along with their faith…shattered like a fragile house of cards. Then came Saturday, a traditional time of stillness and rest as it was the Sabbath. But this particular Saturday was terrifying in its’ deafening silence. God was gone. The disciples, reeling in the chaos of this catastrophic loss, had no hope and no way forward. Did they question everything they had experienced the past three years? Where did God go? If He loved them so much as He passionately expressed, why did He abandon them during their most desperate time of need? What do they do now?
Saturday is the place of no resolution. The place of struggling in between the tension of great evil and great glory. It’s the place of holding your lifeless child in your arms, of failed marriages, terminal illness, and dementia; the place of great financial ruin, sexual assault, injustice, and exhausting care-taking year after year; the place of betrayal, estranged family members, and unfaithful spouses; the place of vicious slander and gossip that destroys relationships; the place of physical disabilities and relentless pain that wracks the body, draining it of any will to live; it’s debilitation from rebellious children and sudden, startling death; it’s the struggle with chronic substance abuse; it’s destructive eating disorders, mental health crises, and unbelieving hearts; it’s where hope deferred truly makes the heart sick. Cruelest of all, it’s the place of judgment—not from God, but from other Christians. “Have you prayed about it?” “It sounds like you’re not trusting God enough.” “You need to have more faith” (as if faith isn’t solely a gift of God’s grace in the first place). “Is there any sin in your life that you’ve hidden?” “Just read your Bible every day.” “Have you sought professional help?” “Well remember, Romans 8:28 says that He’ll work this out for your benefit.” “You have to maintain an eternal mindset.”
These well-intended but trite replies, offered to quickly “fix” people who are waiting in this day, do nothing but add searing salt to the wound, which risks the laceration failing to heal properly and can result in a sort of residual, spiritual scar tissue. Everyone suddenly seems to emulate Job’s very unhelpful cohort, speaking from the shelter of their own perspectives…as if the problem of pain isn’t something about which volumes have been written and mankind has struggled for millennia. “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect you don’t understand,” aptly wrote C.S. Lewis. Where were the sufferers? The battle-weary, war-torn saints who quietly cloaked their scars in hushed humility, hesitant to even engage the topic because of the rubble and carnage of their own adversity?
It is only now that I understand Horatio Spafford’s words penned in the hymn, “It Is Well with My Soul”…because there was nothing else that was well, save his eternal state. Were these the thoughts of the tortured disciples that fateful Saturday?
“Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect you don’t understand.” – C.S. Lewis
Saturday is where we wait and cry out to God as we helplessly watch our nightmares come true. It’s where we can’t do much more than repeatedly utter, “God, help,” but we don’t know how or with what, so we desperately cling to Romans 8:26-27: “Now in the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know what to pray for as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” It’s where we sob, “I do believe; Lord, help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24).
Saturday is when people walk away from God.
When I finally found a wise veteran of anguish, I asked how she had dwelt in Saturday for over 10 years. She answered:
“’Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.’ (John 6:68) At the end of the day – after being angry at God, being wounded and super frustrated by His people…after losing all my energy to even bring myself to pray (Pray? Pray for what?)….my only conclusion was that even though it did not look like I was loved by God, He alone possessed the words of eternal life. Now I look back on those years, and it was LONG, but in the moments I was merely surviving, mainly for my kids, being on an auto-pilot in the survival mode helped me get through it. I think though I must confess that whatever energy I had to get through each day came from my resentment and anger. Some said that such energy was ‘negative energy,’ not life-giving energy. To that, I responded, ‘but God allowed such negative energy to help me survive.’ God WAS there (although silent) – I just could not see or sense His presence for over a decade and I am convinced that it was because His people turned their faces away. God may have intended those people to come around and support me, but if that was His plan, His people did not act on that. Or maybe God allowed His people to not give me support so that now (many years later), I will do almost anything in my power to not have someone feel that same abandonment.”
Praise God she trusted me with her honesty (I think we’ve all learned very few can responsibly handle uncomfortable, distressing truth), because it hardened my resolve to, like her, pursue a lifetime of never responding as others have (and if you’ve been a recipient of this blunder in the past, please, I beg of you, forgive me)…they either simply have never experienced this desolate territory, have had too much time separate them from the rawness of devastation, remain naively ignorant, or have subscribed to the toxic triumphalism so widespread in American evangelicalism. It’s a wonderful opportunity to extend Christ’s compassionate grace, e.g. “Keep your breath to cool your own porridge” (layman’s terms for Matthew 7:5 via C.S. Lewis). In the waiting, perhaps this might encourage your heart, especially the words of John Piper, which underscore Jesus’ words in John 9:1-3:
“As Jesus passed by, He saw a man who had been blind from birth. And His disciples asked Him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him.'”
To everyone enduring their unbearable Saturday, you are not alone. It’s very possible that you didn’t do anything to deserve this place of great unknown and even greater agony. God may very well have selected this trial so that His works might be displayed in you, and He’s not finished yet. I pray this precious truth gives you the strength to keep going: you may now be in Saturday, but Sunday is coming. Jesus’ resurrection from the dead means that suffering, death, and loss do not have the final word in our lives. Sunday IS coming.
My God, it must, or else as Paul said (if the resurrection is false), we of all people are most to be pitied.
With every esteem and respect,
